China Is The World’s First Electrostate

 

China Is The World’s First Electrostate

Steve Hanley

https://cleantechnica.com/2025/05/26/china-is-the-worlds-first-electrostate/

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A recent article by Nassos Stylianou, Jana Tauschinski, and Edward White published by the Financial Times says, “China is the world’s first major electrostate.” What does that mean? Simply this: Many nations have chosen to make coal, oil, and methane the basis of their economies — thereby becoming known as “petrostates.” The list of petrostates is long: Australia, Saudi Arabia, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Qatar, Iraq, Iran, Azerbaijan, the UK, Germany, Venezuela, Brazil, Nigeria — and those are just the major ones.

“Electrostate” connotes a subtle shift from a nation that burns fossil fuels to generate electricity to one that relies primarily on renewables — solar, wind, and hydro. It also implies using that emissions-free electricity as the primary source of energy for industry and transportation within the country. China now ticks all those boxes, according to OilPrice.com. In its May 2025 China Energy Report, Climate Energy Finance wrote:

“In the first fourth months of the year, wind and solar power generation capacity accounted for 89% of new capacity. Solar continued to show significant growth during this period, with 105 GW added — up 75% year-on-year. This was over 8 times more than thermal, and 5 times more than wind. In the month of April alone, 45.2 GW of solar was added, more than Australia’s entire solar power capacity.

“Thermal capacity grew by 13 GW in the first four months of 2025, however, with renewable energy sources including hydro comprising 91 percent of new capacity additions so far this year and total combined wind and solar surpassing thermal in February 2025, coal’s structural decline in the power system is clear and ongoing. No nuclear was added. The average coal plant in China ran for a record low 46.4 percent of the time. Put another way, China keeps adding idle new coal fired power capacity to enhance flexibility and grid stability, not add new generation.”

Upgrading To Commercial Solar Energy

The predictable result of all that new renewable energy is that emissions in China declined slightly in the first four months of 2025. No other industrialized country saw similar reductions. “China now leads the 4th Industrial Revolution, making huge strides in electrification, renewable energy, artificial intelligence (AI), robotics and the Internet of Things. And, just as oil and gas drive the petrostates of the Arab world [and most other countries as well], clean energy technologies are powering China’s growth,” says OilPrice.com.

This emissions decline was driven by the massive surge in renewable deployment, with solar, wind, hydro, and nuclear meeting more than 100% of new electricity demand, thereby displacing fossil fuels, the CEF monthly report suggests.

China Leads In Electrification

Having positioned themselves at the forefront of the global energy transition, Chinese firms are “already quietly leapfrogging to the front of the development race” of the next critical frontier — industrial decarbonization — which will “bridge its carbon peaking and carbon neutrality milestones, reshaping global climate technology markets in the process,” according to testimony given by David Fishman, a Shanghai-based energy expert, to the US–China Economic and Security Review Commission.

China is on a mission to electrify its transportation system, with a focus on electric cars, trucks, and buses coupled with an aggressive expansion of its high speed rail network, which is on pace to exceed all high-speed rail in the rest of the world combined. According to a report by the South China Morning Post on May 25, 2025, “More passengers shuttling between China’s two biggest cities are choosing to hop on a bullet train rather than a flight, as airlines struggle to match the convenience offered by the country’s ultra-modern high-speed rail network.

“The shift to rail has become so pronounced on the busy Beijing–Shanghai route that China’s air travel industry has warned its market is being ‘eroded’, with airlines scrambling to lure back customers with cheaper tickets and free limousine services. Passengers made more than 52 million trips by train between Beijing and Shanghai last year, while only about 8.6 million people took a flight between the two cities, according to civil aviation platform Hangban Guanjia.”

Renewables & Air Conditioning In China

All the good news about China adding massive amounts of renewable energy draws attention away from the larger picture, which is that the Earth is getting significantly hotter because of human activity, and China is not exempt from that reality. Writing for Bloomberg this morning (May 26, 2025), Dan Murtaugh warns that many parts of China are suffering from extreme heat coupled with drought-like conditions that combined are severely damaging many crops.

Many Chinese citizens depend on air conditioners to protect them from the heat, but the electricity to run all those A/C units is straining the country’s electrical grid. China’s National Energy Administration expects peak electricity demand to be as much as 100 gigawatts higher this summer than it was last year. To put that into perspective, 100 GW is equal to the output of all the power plants in the UK.

From 2019 to 2021, China manufactured about 164 million air conditioning units, including heat pumps, for domestic consumption. It exported millions more. But the number has been going up since. Last year, 204 million cooling units were produced for domestic consumers. “Production usually peaks in March, and this year it reached a monthly record of 33.7 million,” Murtaugh wrote.

A Long, Hot Summer

Summer in China brings with it a double whammy of high heat and drought, particularly in the northern and western areas. In other parts for the country, particularly in the south, heavy rains and typhoons are normal. That can provide a boost for hydropower, but in 2022, the rains didn’t come as expected. The Yangtze River retreated to the lowest level on record, causing crippling power shortages in the southern provinces of Sichuan and Yunnan. Factories supplying companies from Apple to Toyota had to shut down production for weeks.

This year, the forecast is for above-normal rainfall from June through August, which will bolster the output from China’s hydropower sector. In addition, the nation has installed hundreds of gigawatts of new wind turbines and solar power installations since 2022, meaning the country should be better prepared to meet a shortfall in hydro should one occur in the future.

The CEF monthly report showed that, through the end of 2024, China added 78 GW of battery storage, nearly tripling the country’s target of 30 GW. The result is that China now has more battery energy storage (57 percent) than hydro capacity. 98.5% of the country’s storage relies on lithium-ion batteries, with other technologies like compressed air and gravity accounting for the rest.

Global Leadership

It is hard to get a handle on China today. The United States is demonizing it for monopolizing much of the supply chains for new technologies like electric vehicles, clean energy, and AI. It is clear that China is far from an open society and may harbor ambitions for becoming the dominant nation on Earth in the near future.

That being said, on 23 April 2025, President Xi Jinping reaffirmed China’s climate goals and pledged to announce his country’s emissions data ahead of the next global climate conference this fall. The US, having withdrawn from the international emissions reduction framework for a second time, will not. Xi told the conference, “No matter how the international situation changes, China will not slow down its efforts to address climate change, promote international cooperation, or stop building a community with a shared future for mankind.”

Readers may choose to take Xi at his word or not, but the US this week announced it will no longer impose any emissions restrictions on coal or methane-fired generating stations. US emissions are rising while China’s are falling. From that perspective, which country is doing a better job of respecting the needs of its host planet?